Bulgarian government officials are at pains to issue assurances that the March 2017 parliamentary elections will succeed in spite of the new and costly complication about having to supply voting machines to all polling stations. But the Central Election Commission has admitted the process could face the possibility of no one meeting the conditions to provide the machines or the procurement process facing a court challenge – though the commission is insisting that if this happened, it would not call into question the legitimacy of the elections. Months after the now-departed National Assembly voted the latest rewrite of electoral laws, and months after Boiko Borissov’s government resigned and set the country on the path to early elections, the election process faces an unforeseen complication. Or one that could have been foreseen.
The Central Election Commission initially provided for only 500 voting machines at the country’s 12 000 polling stations. On February 1, the Supreme Administrative Court upheld an application compelling the commission to comply with the law that every polling station should present the voter with a choice between a ballot paper and using a machine to vote.
The CEC’s initial choice to deploy only 500 machines was apparently taken for budget reasons, and after the court’s decision, electoral officials made it clear that they were facing a difficult task.
Dessislava Atanassova, of Borissov’s GERB party, said that the CEC had had several months to approach Parliament to ask for a change to the law compelling the availability of voting machines at all polling stations. It also had had several months to initiate a public procurement procedure to acquire sufficient machines. But the CEC did neither. Currently, the law cannot be amended. There is no Parliament to do so, with the 43rd National Assembly having been dissolved as part of constitutional procedures towards the holding of the early parliamentary elections.
Full Article: Bulgaria’s March 2017 elections: Welcome to the machine | The Sofia Globe.